Ulysses - Gabler Edition [214]
BLOOM
(with precaution) I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that’s left of him.
RUDOLPH
(severely) One night they bring you home drunk as dog after spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?
BLOOM
(in youth’s smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent’s sterling silver Waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud) Harriers, father. Only that once.
RUDOLPH
Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.
BLOOM
(weakly) They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.
RUDOLPH
(with contempt) Goim nachez! Nice spectacles for your poor mother!
BLOOM
Mamma!
ELLEN BLOOM
(in pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand, and cries out in shrill alarm) O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all at all?
(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)
A VOICE
(sharply) Poldy!
BLOOM
Who? (he ducks and wards off a blow clumsily) At your service.
(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)
BLOOM
Molly!
MARION
Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me. (satirically) Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?
BLOOM
(shifts from foot to foot) No, no. Not the least little bit.
(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions, hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire, spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)
MARION
Nebrakada! Femininum!
(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit, offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof, then droops his head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops his back for leapfrog.)
BLOOM
I can give you ... I mean as your business menagerer .. Mrs Marion ..... if you ....
MARION
So you notice some change? (her hands passing slowly over her trinketed stomacher, a slow friendly mockery in her eyes) O Poldy, Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the wide world.
BLOOM
I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning. (he pats divers pockets) This moving kidney. Ah!
(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)
THE SOAP
We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.
(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)
SWENY
Three and a penny, please.
BLOOM
Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.
MARION
(softly) Poldy!
BLOOM
Yes, ma’am?
MARION
Ti trema un poco il cuore?
(In disdain she saunters away, humming the duet from Don Giovanni, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon.)